2013 Muriels: Best Supporting Actor

Another year, another round of Muriel Awards! This year's actually a bit odd for me, as it's the first year I'm serving solely as an overseer rather than an active voter. What does that mean you reading this? Not a goddamn thing. Let's just jump on in, then!

Third place:



Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street [111 points / 19 votes]

Second place:



Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave [124 points / 20 votes]

And your winner...

The Muriels Hall of Fame: The Voters

Thanks again to all the people who participated in this year's Hall of Fame voting:

Jason Alley

Danny Baldwin

Josh Bell

Andrew Bemis

Christianne Benedict

Donald G. Carder

Steven Carlson

Kevin Cecil

Paul Clark

Dennis Cozzalio

Philip Dyess-Nugent

Jim Emerson

James Frazier

Kenji Fujishima

Jaime Grijalba

Russell Hainline

Glenn Heath

Sam Juliano

Peter Labuza

Adam Lemke

Michael Lieberman

Craig Lindsey

Matt Lynch

Lucas McNelly

Matt Noller

Mark Pfeiffer

Cole Roulain

Philip Tatler

Hedwig van Driel

Scott Von Doviak

Bryan Whitefield

Patrick Williamson

Bryce Wilson

George Wu

Let's do this again next year, OK?

The Muriels Hall of Fame: Complete Voting Results

For those who are curious, here's the complete results list for the final round of voting. Unlike the regular Muriels, I've decided not to post the individual Hall of Fame ballots, although any voter who wishes to post his or her own may do so.

Note: because the Hall of Fame balloting process is currently the only means by which short films (i.e. under 40 minutes) may be elected to the Hall of Fame, I've decided to institute a special rule whereby the top-ranking short film that cracks the top 25 in the final round of voting gets inducted into the Hall of Fame even if it doesn't make the top 10 overall. Hopefully this will bode well in future years as we get more into sixties-era experimental films and the like.

2013 Muriels Hall of Fame voting:
(* - indicates inducted films)

* Citizen Kane (1941, Welles) [142 points / 14 votes]
* The Passion of Joan of Arc (1928, Dreyer) [117/11]
* Rear Window (1954, Hitchcock) [93.5/10]
* Sunrise (1927, Murnau) [83.5/9]
* Casablanca (1942, Curtiz) [78.5/8]
* The Third Man (1949, Reed) [77.5/8]
* Sansho the Bailiff (1954, Mizoguchi) [74.5/7]
* The Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Vertov) [72/8]
* The Rules of the Game (1939, Renoir) [71.5/8]
* M (1931, Lang) [69/7]
Touch of Evil (1958, Welles) [68/7]
Sherlock Jr. (1924, Keaton) [66/6]
The Searchers (1956, Ford) [65.5/7]
Double Indemnity (1944, Wilder) [64.5/8]
* La Jetée (1962, Marker) [63.5/7] {inducted as outstanding short film}
Rio Bravo (1959, Hawks) [61/6]
The Maltese Falcon (1941, Huston) [60/6]
The Red Shoes (1948, Powell/Pressburger) [59.5/6]
Sunset Blvd. (1950, Wilder) [59.5/6]
The 400 Blows (1959, Truffaut) [54.5/5]
Singin' in the Rain (1952, Donen/Kelly) [54.5/5]
The Seven Samurai (1954, Kurosawa) [54/5]
The Night of the Hunter (1955, Laughton) [51/6]
Tokyo Story (1953, Ozu) [50/5]
City Lights (1931, Chaplin) [49.5/5]
The General (1926, Keaton/Bruckman) [46.5/5]
Bride of Frankenstein (1935, Whale) [45.5/5]
Nosferatu (1922, Murnau) [44.5/5]
Window Water Baby Moving (1959, Brakhage) [43.5/5]
The Lady Eve (1941, Sturges) [42/5]
Only Angels Have Wings (1939, Hawks) [41.5/4]
L'Avventura (1960, Antonioni) [41/4]
The Earrings of Madame De... (1953, Ophüls) [40.5/4]
Jules et Jim (1962, Truffaut) [40/4]
Un Chien Andalou (1930, Bunuel/Dali) [39.5/4]
Rashomon (1950, Kurosawa) [39.5/4]
Notorious (1946, Hitchcock) [38/5]
The Killing (1956, Kubrick) [38/4]
Last Year at Marienbad (1962, Resnais) [38/4]
Metropolis (1926, Lang) [38/4]
L'Atalante (1934, Vigo) [37.5/4]
Breathless (1960, Godard) [37.5/4]
Ikiru (1952, Kurosawa) [37.5/4]
Modern Times (1936, Chaplin) [36.5/4]
The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp (1943, Powell/Pressburger) [35/4]
His Girl Friday (1940, Hawks) [34.5/4]
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre (1948, Huston) [33.5/4]
A Man Escaped (1956, Bresson) [32/3]
The Apartment (1960, Wilder) [29.5/3]
The Magnificent Ambersons (1942, Welles) [29.5/3]
Children of Paradise (1945, Carne) [29/3]
Beauty and the Beast (1946, Cocteau) [28.5/3]
Rififi (1955, Dassin) [27/3]
Wild Strawberries (1957, Bergman) [27/3]
Duck Amuck (1953, Jones) [25.5/3]
On the Waterfront (1954, Kazan) [25.3/3]
Les Vampires (1915, Feuillade) [23.5/3]
Duck Soup (1933, McCarey) [23.5/2]
It's a Wonderful Life (1946, Capra) [23.5/2]
Hiroshima Mon Amour (1959, Resnais) [22.5/3]
Umberto D (1952, De Sica) [22.5/3]
Orpheus (1949, Cocteau) [22/2]
Sweet Smell of Success (1957, Mackendrick) [21/3]
I Know Where I'm Going! (1945, Powell/Pressburger) [20.5/2]
Make Way For Tomorrow (1937, McCarey) [19.5/2]
Paths of Glory (1957, Kubrick) [19.5/2]
I Was Born, But... (1932, Ozu) [18.5/2]
The Testament of Dr. Mabuse (1933, Lang) [18.5/2]
One of the Past (1947, Tournehr) [17.5/2]
The Wizard of Oz (1939, Fleming) [14.5/2]
Throne of Blood (1957, Kurosawa) [14/2]
La Dolce Vita (1960, Fellini) [13/1]
Bringing Up Baby (1938, Hawks) [9.5/1]
Ménilmontant (1926, Kirsanoff) [9.5/1]
Monsieur Verdoux (1947, Chaplin) [9.5/1]
Freaks (1932, Browning) [6/1]

The Muriels Hall of Fame: Citizen Kane (1941, Orson Welles)

And finally…

“I admit it: it’s hard to write about a movie like this without using well-worn platitudes. Forget the top 100, this is a film whose title has become synonymous with “greatest ever”, even though the voters in the 2012 Sight & Sound poll of greatest films chose the more recent Vertigo, thereby ending Citizen Kane’s 50-year reign as numero uno. Not surprisingly, much has been written, spoken, filmed and compiled about such an influential film, and much of it covers similar territory. For instance:

“What we talk about when we talk about Citizen Kane (a listicle for the lazy or uninitiated):

1. Orson Welles’ brilliance

2. The Mercury Theatre

3. The War of the Worlds radio broadcast

4. William Randolph Hearst

5. The special RKO Pictures contract

6. Orson Welles’ young age = 25

7. Greatest Film, etc. etc.

8. Rosebud (SPOILER)

9. Welles, Welles, Welles

10. References to frozen peas (maybe my house only)

“While most of these elements are worth discussing, I recently rewatched the film, and couldn’t help but notice the murderers’ row of technical talent compiled for this classic. For example, if you don’t revere cinematographer Gregg Toland’s work on the screen, consider for a moment the challenge of working with a novice director full of Big Ideas, and using that opportunity to unleash creativity. Toland’s inventive use of low angles and deep focus added volumes of subtext to Kane’s characters. He also employed radical visual techniques with altered viewpoints, including figures shot in heavy shadows or stark beams of light, through window frames and glass globes, and even in full-length mirrored reflections which managed to convey isolation among the film’s large scope and cavernous spaces of Xanadu or an opera house. Editor Robert Wise regularly employed breathtaking dissolves and montages to keep this mammoth-sized tale taut. One of the film’s great sequences captures the rise and fall of Kane’s marriage through a few scenes of bantering across a breakfast table, stitched together with quick camera pans. It’s two and a half minutes of pure joy, with no fat to trim.

This technical wizardry wouldn’t be possible without the unique puzzle that is Kane’s screenplay, credited to Herman Mankiewicz and Welles. It’s a larger than life character study of an old man who lies dead within the first few minutes of footage. It is worth noting that Kane’s primary existence is as a public figure on a huge stage, in his life and after his death. Therefore, we are only provided his legacy Rashomon-style, through newsreel footage, rumors and the contradicting memories of those who actually knew him. Overall though, the script, the visuals, the craft of the film is a trap. As much as Kane occupies most of the screen time, we’ll never truly understand his motives, as he is far too complex to be captured completely. However, we are left to ponder: Do life milestones define us or determine our fate? With Citizen Kane, at least we understand that the journey toward understanding can be very rewarding.

~ Patrick Williamson

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: Man With a Movie Camera (1929, Dziga Vertov)

"In 1929, Dziga Vertov conducted a little experiment. Seeking to create what he expressed as, 'a truly international language of cinema, based on its absolute separation from the language of theater and literature,' he and his brother, Mikhail Kaufman, turned a 'kino-eye' on the Ukrainian cities of Odessa, Kharkiv, and Kiev, shooting footage of just about anything that caught their eye, or sparked their imagination. Once filming was complete, Vertov and his wife Elizaveta Svilova retired to the editing room and began collating clips into small, contextually labeled canisters (e.g., 'People,' 'The Plant,' 'The Bazaar,' 'Magician,' 'Machinery,' etc.). Once the menagerie was catalogued, the scissors came out, theory was put into practice, and the rest, as they say, is history.

"Man With a Movie Camera is, first and foremost, a documentary; a snapshot of life in a Soviet city. It begins at dawn, tracking the gradual awakenings of the city and its inhabitants as they emerge from slumber and trickle into the environs and engines of everyday life. It ends, as most days do, with the gradual slowdown of the day's activities, as machines go idle and the people set aside their labors to indulge in a litle rest and relaxation. As documentaries go, pretty standard stuff.

"Where Vertov's film differs, however, is in how he presented these images to the movie-going public. The film is not just a documentary of place, but also an essay on the art of cinema itself. As mentioned above, Vertov referred to his camera as his 'kino eye;' a mechanical extension of his physical/mental self, thus capable of capturing the essence of humanity and storing it like a ghost within the machine. Just as the human brain records and recalls experience, so, too, does the camera, and, with that idea in mind, he and his wife set about assembling their film in a way that reflected the rapid-fire reportage of human thought. Their goal was to see if cinema, like memory, was capable of supplying significance sans structure, wherein creative editing could achieve that delicate alchemy where an image alone fuses with the mind of the viewer to engender empathy, acknowledgement, and understanding.

"And so, Vertov's film hits the viewer's eye like a shot gun blast, peppering the mind with wave after wave of seemingly disconnected images that imprint not only an impression of people, places, and things, but the idea of a city itself; its soul, if you will. Images wash over you like water, and their significance and meaning slowly seep into your subconscious. Your thoughts and memories begin to intertwine with the visual display, and you begin to relate to these lives as keenly as your own. And suddenly, you realize that humanity has indeed been harnessed by Vertov's machine, and that you, the viewer, have become symbiotically and psychologically linked to his subjects. Your combined experiences influence and define each other, and you become one consciousness adrift on the ocean of being. The past becomes present, and all lives interconnect.

"So was the experiment sucessful? Most definitely. (You wouldn't be reading this if it weren't). Man With a Movie Camera is a tour-de-force of technical proficiency, incorporating filming and editing techniques that are hallmarks of past, present, and what would become the future of cinematic artistry. Its innovative use of non-linear narrative is both groundbreaking and intellectually sublime. But it is in the way Dziga Vertov utilized these proficiencies that he achieves his thesis, and thus, leaves an indelible stamp upon the history of film."

~ Donald G. Carder

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: The Rules of the Game (1939, Jean Renoir)

"Movies both good and bad have always sent out ripples which have caused the surface waters of cinema history to undulate and swoon and reflect their influence, however undue, benign, creative or destructive. The waves generated and felt by truly great movies, on the other hand, shift the contours of the surface, all right, but their real influence can be almost subterranean, affecting not only the way movies in their wake look and sound and feel, but also how the sensibilities at the heart of their creation can speak across oceans and generations.

"When Jean Renoir’s Le regle de jeu (The Rules of the Game) was conceived, written and filmed, in a span between 1938 and 1939, France was a country torn in its political tolerance and responses to cataclysmic events on the European front that made the looming shadow of Hitler’s rise to power and influence ever harder to ignore. Renoir’s film, a comic roundelay of marital discord, class-generated disdain and general societal distraction decorated with a patina of good manners and brittle loyalties, sought to engage with its audience in a paradoxically airy manner, to diagnose and autopsy the corrosively blithe ignorance the director saw at the heart of the country’s, and indeed Europe’s, collective self-deception with a sort of romantic sleight of hand. (Renoir once famously characterized the movie as a portrait of a complex society dancing on a volcano.)

"Renoir cast himself as the would-be fool, Octave, a caustic but affable bear of a man (quite literally a bear, at one point) whose allegiances to the various players in an ostensibly breezy farce of adultery, the sophistication of which becomes ever more apparently feigned and insincere, are almost immediately tested. (His friend LeChesnaye, lord of the manor, sees him, at least initially, less a fool than a dangerous poet.) Octave’s empathy-- 'Everyone has their reasons'-- extends not only to his wealthy hosts, who have invited each other’s lovers, Genevieve, a bored society wife and Andre, a famous (and famously lovelorn) aviator, along with several other friends to a weekend of frivolity at their country estate. He also shares the hearts of various members of the mansion’s staff, and the confusion of those empathies will fuel the tragedy at the heart of Renoir’s liltingly critical vision of cultural decadence and casual brutality. The film’s famous pheasant hunting sequence may be even more difficult to watch today than it was in 1939, but some of the sympathetic conversation in The Rules of the Game is similarly cutting. When LeChesnaye’s wife Christine discovers that her husband’s own betrayal, which has gone far more effectively hidden than the one she has rather openly cultivated with the aviator, it is Octave who justifies the deception by associating it with the general behavior of the times. 'Everyone lies,' he tells her, 'pharmaceutical fliers, government, newspapers, the cinema. So why shouldn’t simple people like us lie as well?'

"Reviled upon its release, Renoir’s movie can be felt in everything from the tacky violence of Larry Peerce’s The Sporting Club (1970), based on a Thomas McGuane novel, to Alan Bridges’ The Shooting Party (1985), to intimate epics of television drama like Upstairs Downstairs and Downton Abbey and, of course, features like Gosford Park, written by Downton Abbey creator Julian Fellowes. (One could go even further and suggest that the career of Robert Altman, director of Gosford Park, might not exist in quite the same way without the encouraging influence of Renoir stretching to inspire his own.) But what’s most striking about watching The Rules of the Game in 2013, what cements its stature as a truly great movie, is the degree to which its political and interpersonal acuity seem, aside from its period specifics, simultaneously of its time and also utterly contemporary. This 1939 film, made in the darkening path of perhaps the greatest evil the world has ever seen, can connect to contemporary audiences in surprisingly painful and biting ways. The sense of global malaise, isolation and insecurity—some of it inspired by technology of which Renoir could never have dreamed— which is a hallmark of our own very modern self-deceptions and distractions is effortlessly accessed here, making Renoir’s marvelously deft and witty movie seem as pertinent, and as impertinent, as it ever was."

~ Dennis Cozzalio

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The Muriels Hall of Fame: The Third Man (1949, Carol Reed)

"From the moment Anton Karas’ iconic zither score starts up, The Third Man draws the viewer in to its murky, morally compromised world, defined by the particular post-World War II makeup of its setting, Vienna. It’s no coincidence that the movie’s protagonist, Holly Martins (Joseph Cotten), is a writer of dime-store Westerns; Vienna itself is like the Wild West, full of outlaws and competing authorities, home to a thriving black market. None of the characters are white hats or black hats, though; Holly is the closest thing the movie has to a hero, and even he ends up emotionally scarred and morally compromised by the end.

"Director Carol Reed shoots the corrupt Vienna from a constantly skewed perspective, making extensive use of Dutch angles and ominous shadows. Nearly every person in the city looks suspicious; no one merely stands or leans when they can lurk. Holly himself is constantly eyed with suspicion as he tries to find out what happened to his old friend Harry Lime (Orson Welles), who has apparently died under mysterious circumstances. That Harry is in fact alive isn’t a surprise so much as an inevitability (Welles’ name is, after all, right there in the opening credits), but his first appearance, an hour into the film, is nevertheless a sort of shock, his devilish grin piercing through the gloom of the dysfunctional city.

"Welles essentially gets two scenes, one of which is Harry’s deservedly iconic speech to Holly as they look down on the city from a ferris wheel, and Harry is more of a specter than an active participant in the story. He haunts the city, he haunts Holly, he haunts the British officer determined to take down his black-market operation. Perhaps most of all he haunts his girlfriend Anna (Valli), who clothes herself in his monogrammed pajamas and refuses to stop loving him, no matter how much she learns about his awful deeds. Holly may kill Harry (for real this time) in the end, but his presence is no weaker for his physical body being gone. Like the war itself, Harry is a demon that Vienna and its inhabitants will be unable to shake for a very long time."

~ Josh Bell

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